Costa Rica and Nicaragua; Remember La Penca and Ronald Reagan

NotiCen, 9:23, 17 June 2004

Former US President Ronald Reagan died just days after the 20th
anniversary of the bombing at La Penca, a place inside Nicaragua on
the Costa Rica border. The bombing, an act of terrorism almost
entirely forgotten in the US, is well-remembered in a region that was
once the focus of Reagan's foreign policy.

The May 30, 1984, explosion at a press conference called by Eden
Pastora, the famed Sandinista Comandante Cero of the 1979 Nicaraguan
revolution, left four dead, three of them journalists. Since then,
books have been written and lawsuits launched, but no one has ever
been tried for a multiple murder that Costa Rica still treats as an
active case that is seriously stalled.

Attorney General Francisco Dall'Anese has blamed US obstruction in
the form of blocked access to classified documents. In a Feb. 27,
2004, letter to Costa Rica's Defensor de los Habitantes Jose
Manuel Echandi, he enumerated the reasons for the deadlock:

Exhaustive investigations in Costa Rica have not yielded sufficient
results to bring a case to trial.

Documents in the possession of the Senate of the United States of
America have been declared secret by the US government and are
therefore inaccessible.

It has not been possible to identify the material author of
the crime, not even through Interpol, and efforts to extradite US
citizen John Hull and Miami-based Cuban-American Felipe Vidal have
been fruitless.

Of the three reasons, Dall'Anese said in the letter, The second
point [the Senate documents] is the major obstacle to terminating the
investigations because the identity of the author of the deeds could
be established and linked to Hull, and, without evidence, it is
impossible to found an accusation.

Costa Rican authorities have attempted to extradite two alleged CIA
collaborators, Hull and Vidal, from the US, but to no avail. Hull
operated a ranch on the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border identified by
resupply pilots as a transshipment point for military supplies and
drugs. In the present Washington climate, authorities have little
hope of gaining access either to information or to material witnesses.

But prosecutor Paula Guido, who has had responsibility for the case
for the past three years, said she is preparing a case to present in
Costa Rica rather than wait years for a declassification of documents
that may never come.

Missing the mark

Eden Pastora, a central figure in the case, was a disaffected
Sandinista commander who went over to the US side, operating out of a
safe zone in Costa Rica, just across the Nicaragua border. Most
people following this case concur Pastora was the presumptive target
of the bombing. He had called a press conference at his camp on the
Rio San Juan at which he was expected to announce his refusal to join
the other US-backed contras.

Though estranged from the Sandinistas, the leader of the takeover of
the 1978 National Palace in Managua wanted no part of surrogates fresh
from the ranks of an earlier US creation, Nicaraguan dictator
Anastasio Somoza's repressive National Guard.

But Pastora had CIA support anyway, and for that reason it is unclear
who might have plotted his assassination. Both the US and the
Sandinistas had reason to want him dead. He told The Tico Times
recently that he thinks both the CIA and the Sandinistas were
involved. They both needed him killed to facilitate the
implementation of a war-ending agreement secretly signed by the two
sides in Manzanillo, Mexico, earlier in 1984.

He told The Tico Times, whose reporter Linda Frazier was killed in the
explosion, It was a cross of interests. The Frente [Frente
Sandinista para la Liberacion Nacional, FSLN] and a rightwing sector
of the United States wanted to kill me. The Frente supplied the
manpower and the CIA supplied the technology. Pastora explained
the collaboration, saying, The gringos do not have enemies or
friends, they only have interests.

Martha Honey, a US journalist who conducted an 18-month investigation
into the incident along with her husband Tony Avirgan who was injured
in the blast, concurred with the premise. The more indications
there are, the more there is the real sense of a lack of resolution,
and the trail points to both the CIA and the Sandinistas. My guess is
it involved both sides.

That contradictory convergence of interests, together with the
ineptness of execution, eventually rose out of subtext to become the
story itself. John McPhaul, managing editor of The Tico Times in
1984, told the paper, La Penca really seemed to have a double
dimension. There was La Penca the despicable crime and terrorist act,
and La Penca the political sideshow. At times during the course of
the La Penca investigation many seemed more interested in pinning the
crime on one side or the other than in bringing the facts to light and
letting them speak for themselves.

Bomber named, but doubts persist

Eventually, the person who planted the bomb was identified by name.
He was, according to a Miami Herald investigative report nearly a
decade later, a member of a pro-Sandinista Argentine group. His name
was Vital Roberto Gaguine. He was reportedly killed in a 1989 attack
on an Argentine military base. At La Penca, Gaguine was posing as a
journalist with the stolen passport of a Dane named Per Anker Hansen.
The association between the perpetrator and the FSLN led the Herald
reporter, Juan Tamayo, to conclude that the Sandinistas were solely
responsible.

But that conclusion has not found universal acceptance among those
still working on to the case. Guido said, About the real identity
of Per Anker Hansen, I still have some doubts.

Summing the efforts at solving the crime to date, Robert Rivard,
Newsweek magazine's Central American bureau chief at the time of
the bombing, told The Tico Times, La Penca was an unjustifiable act
of terror, and there is blame enough for all the region's players
to bear: the Sandinistas and the US intelligence community, each of
whom believed their ends justified the means; Eden Pastora, a weekend
revolutionary propped up by the Reagan administration, who saw to his
own evacuation from the jungle while Linda Frazier was left behind to
bleed to death; and even Costa Rica, which turned a blind eye to so
much covert activity on its own soil.

Linda Frazier's husband Joe Frazier, an Associated Press
correspondent in the region for decades, has suspicions running long
and deep. The US Embassy marked the anniversary with a denial of any
involvement in La Penca, but Frazier, remembering the Reagan years in
Central America, said, I don't think the United States has done
anything at all to attempt to find out what happened. Under the
administration at the time, it couldn't have cared less.

Frazier said his suspicion of US involvement has grown through the
years. He recounted an incident. I was talking to a former [US]
ambassador to Honduras, and we were discussing [La Penca] and he
asked, 'Do you think we did it?' and I said, 'I think you
certainly knew about it, and probably signed off on it,' and he
was silent, didn't say a word.

Attorney General Dall'Anese concluded in his letter to Echandi,
In this situation, the appropriate thing is to maintain an open
investigation awaiting evidence that could come to lessen the
uncertainty of the process, because given the gravity of the acts, it
is not acceptable to close the investigation at the moment.

The La Penca bombing ranks among the very smallest of incidents of
violent death that mark the Reagan legacy in Central America, but
along with the thousands who mourn their dead in Nicaragua, El
Salvador, and Guatemala, reporters, too, remember their own.
[Sources: williambowles.info, 06/07/91; La Prensa (Nicaragua), The
Tico Times (Costa Rica), 04/13/04; NotiMex, 06/14/04]

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